every blighted tree; and appalling shapes were manufactured from each

shaggy bush. By degrees these common marvels palled on us, and then other

wonders were called into being. Once it was confidently asserted, that the

sun rose an hour later than its seasonable time; again it was discovered

that he grew paler and paler; that shadows took an uncommon appearance. It

was impossible to have imagined, during the usual calm routine of life men

had before experienced, the terrible effects produced by these extravagant

delusions: in truth, of such little worth are our senses, when unsupported

by concurring testimony, that it was with the utmost difficulty I kept

myself free from the belief in supernatural events, to which the major part

of our people readily gave credit. Being one sane amidst a crowd of the

mad, I hardly dared assert to my own mind, that the vast luminary had

undergone no change--that the shadows of night were unthickened by

innumerable shapes of awe and terror; or that the wind, as it sung in the

trees, or whistled round an empty building, was not pregnant with sounds of

wailing and despair. Sometimes realities took ghostly shapes; and it was

impossible for one's blood not to curdle at the perception of an evident

mixture of what we knew to be true, with the visionary semblance of all

that we feared.

Once, at the dusk of the evening, we saw a figure all in white, apparently

of more than human stature, flourishing about the road, now throwing up its

arms, now leaping to an astonishing height in the air, then turning round

several times successively, then raising itself to its full height and

gesticulating violently. Our troop, on the alert to discover and believe in

the supernatural, made a halt at some distance from this shape; and, as it

537

The Last Man